It was rumoured that Intel's Ivy Bridge Core i3 CPUs will ship on or about June 24th, and although it was not clear if we will see desktop or mobile parts, it appears that the date was correct. Intel has finally launched its third generation Core i3 CPUs but only for mobile market. The Core i3-3110M and the Core i3-3217U are both based on Intel's 22nm architecture and feature two cores, Intel HD 4000 Graphics and Hyper-threading.

When it comes to specs, the 2.4GHz clocked dual-core Core i3-3110M has 512kB (2x256kB) of L2 and 3MB of L3 cache, Intel HD 4000 Graphics and dual-channel DDR3-1600 memory. The Core i3-3110M supports hyper-threading, so you are looking at two cores and four threads, but lacks Intel's Turbo Boost technology and AES instructions. It is aimed at mainstream notebooks and has a 35W TDP.

The Core i3-3217U is an ULV dual-core CPU working at 1.8GHz. It is pretty much identical to the Core i3-3110M, so you are looking at 512MB of L2 cache and 3MB of L3 cache, same Intel HD 4000 graphics with somewhat lower clocks and hyper-threading. The low, 1.8GHz CPU clock sounds a tad bit too low but the 17W TDP is quite impressive since this one is aimed at Ultrabooks.

Despite the fact that some spinners at HP and Intel are quite annoyed now, an early review of HP's upcoming Ivy Bridge EliteBook 8470p has managed to find its way online, courtesy of Laptop Reviews. Based on an unidentified Intel Core i7 Ivy Bridge CPU clocked at 1.7GHz with 2.6GHz Turbo and paired up with Intel HD graphics 4000, the new HP Elitebook 8470p and this early review clearly shows what you could expect from the upcoming Intel Ivy Bridge lineup.

There isn't much to be said for HP's EliteBook lineup as these have always been pretty good and aimed at professional part of the market but more interesting are the actual specs and performance of this HP EliteBook 8470p. Laptop Reviews site ran a couple of general performance benchmarks including PCMark 7, PCMark Vantage, Performance Test 7 from PassMark as well as some more interesting 3D benchmarks, or to be precise Futuremark's 3DMark Vantage. The CPU part looks quite impressive and it outruns both Intel's Core i7-2670QM in all benchmarks, but that honestly doesn't come as a surprise.

The surprise actually hides in 3DMark Vantage results as it appears that Intel's 50 percent higher performance claim for the HD Graphics 4000 are true. It is still not anywhere near results that you'll get from a dedicated mobile GPU, but up from 1,513/1,845 score on Intel HD 3000 Graphics to 3,321 on new Intel HD 4000, is certainly a great deal.

Of course, this is an engineering sample of HP's EliteBook and engineering sample of the Ivy Bridge CPU, but it surely gives a hint or two. You can find the entire early review over at LaptopReviews.com.